Facebook

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on inauthentic coordinated link sharing on Facebook in the run-up to the 2018 Italian and 2019 European election in Italy. ‘Coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ is a term used by Facebook itself, especially to justify its periodic mass account take-downs; the term remains poorly defined, however, and Facebook’s own press releases mainly point to a one-minute video that it has published to define the term.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 panel is Anders Olof Larsson, whose focus is on the developments of online political communication in Sweden – this covers the 2010, 2014, and 2018 national elections. His focus is especially on the rise of populism in Swedish politics, and the platformisation of messaging in election campaigns.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Jakob Linaa Jensen, who focusses on the Danish political environment. He and his colleagues conducted surveys amongst Internet users in four Danish election campaigns (2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019) to examine their experiences with the role of social media in national elections. Denmark has a multi-party system, and Facebook is clearly the leading social media platform here.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the fabulous Jenny Stromer-Galley, who shifts our focus to 2014 and 2018 gubernatorial campaigns in the United States. She begins by noting the significant growth in negative advertising in U.S. elections, and this increase may also have led to a gradual decline in voter turnout as well as a general mistrust of political and democratic institutions.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean everything and nothing. For example, what does it mean to be inside an filter bubble or echo chamber? Do you need to be completely cut off from the world around you, which seems to be what those metaphors suggest? Only in such extreme cases – which are perhaps similar to being in a cult that has completely disconnected from the rest of society – can the severe negative effects that the supporters of the echo chamber or filter bubble theories imagine actually become reality, because they assume that people in echo chambers or filter bubbles no longer see any content that disagrees with their political worldviews.

Now, such complete disconnection is not entirely impossible, but very difficult to achieve and maintain. And most of the empirical evidence we have points in the opposite direction. In particular, the immense success of extremist political propaganda (including ‘fake news’, another very problematic and poorly defined term) in the US, the UK, parts of Europe, and even in Brazil itself in recent years provides a very strong argument against echo chambers and filter bubbles: if we were all locked away in our own bubbles, disconnected from each other, then such content could not have travelled as far, and could not have affected as many people, as quickly as it appears to have done. Illiberal governments wouldn’t invest significant resources in outfits like the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ troll farm if their influence operations were confined to existing ideological bubbles; propaganda depends crucially on the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles if it seeks to influence more people than those who are already part of a narrow group of hyperpartisans.

(Crossposted from the Polity blog.)

Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.

But these metaphors are built on very flimsy foundations, and it’s high time that we examined the actual evidence for their existence with a critical eye. That’s what my book Are Filter Bubbles Real? sets out to do. There are several recent studies that claim to have identified filter bubbles and echo chambers in search results and social media discussions, yet there are just as many that find no evidence or report contradictory results, so what’s really going on here? Is the impact of these phenomena on public opinion really as significant as common sense seems to suggest?

As it turns out, neither concept is particularly well-defined, and even the authors who first introduced these metaphors to media and communication studies rarely ventured far beyond anecdote and supposition. In the book, I introduce more rigorous definitions, and re-evaluate some of the key research findings of recent studies against these new criteria – and as it turns out, most claims about echo chambers and filter bubbles and their negative impacts on society are significantly overblown. These concepts are very suggestive metaphors, but ultimately they’re myths.

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of journalism’s transformation in the wake of sociotechnological transformations resulting from the rise of blogs, citizen journalism, and contemporary social media to the present day.

The focus here is especially on the way that gatewatching and newssharing practices on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have changed audience activities around both breaking news stories and habitual news engagement, on the attempts by the journalism industry and by individual newsworkers to address and accommodate such changes, and on the implications this has for democracy and the public sphere as such.

Are Filter Bubbles Real?

My second new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, is something of an unexpected companion piece to Gatewatching and News Curation, and was published by Polity Books in 2019; it’s also available from Amazon, of course. As I wrote Gatewatching and News Curation, it became increasingly clear how much we are hampered, misled, and distracted from more important questions by the metaphors of echo chambers and filter bubbles that are no longer fit for purpose, and probably never were. From my conversations at the many conferences, I know that many of my colleagues feel the same.

In the book, I offer a critical evaluation of the evidence for and against echo chambers and filter bubbles. If, like me, you’re fed up with these vague concepts, based on little more evidence than hunches and anecdotes, this book is for you; if you think that there’s still some value in using them, I hope I am at least able to introduce some more specific definitions and empirical rigour into the debate. In either case, perhaps I will convince you that the debate about these information cocoons distracts us from more critical questions at present.